For several years, newspapers, magazines, and television newscasts ran hundreds of stories on the debates over Gramm-Rudman, the views of all sorts of experts on the urgent need for deficit reduction, and the eventual enactment of the legislation. Take, for example, the long effort in the 1980s to eliminate the federal deficit, centered on the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Amendment. Journalists and politicians have become ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that misleads the public. Weaver, a former political scientist (at Harvard University), journalist (at Fortune magazine), and corporate communications executive (at Ford Motor Company), in his provocative analysis entitled News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works. The two institutions have become so ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that the news media are unable to tell the public what is true and the government is unable to govern effectively. Too often, the crises are not really crises but joint fabrications. Journalists need crises to dramatize news, and government officials need to appear to be responding to crises. The news media and the government are entwined in a vicious circle of mutual manipulation, mythmaking, and self-interest. It fails to do what it claims to do, what it should do, and what society expects it to do. Corrupt not so much in the sense that it accepts bribes but in a systemic sense. government, is a corrupt and troubled institution. Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America, Cynthia Crossen (Simon & Schuster, 1994). Who Stole the News?: Why We Can’t Keep Up with What Happens in the World, Mort Rosenblum (John Wiley & Sons, 1993). News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works, Paul H.
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